Is the UN Peacekeeping Role in Eclipse?

ROBERT L. McCLURE and MORTON ORLOV II

From Parameters, Autumn 1999, pp. 96-105.

On 6 October 1998, the United Nations commemorated
50 years of international peacekeeping with a noteworthy ceremony in New
York. At that event, Secretary General Kofi Annan presented the organization's
newest award, the Dag Hammarskjold Medal, to the family of the first UN
peacekeeper killed in the line of duty--Major René Labarriere of
France. Major Labarriere was killed on 6 July 1948 while assigned to the
UN's first peacekeeping entity, the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization
(UNTSO), which was formed to oversee the truce resulting from the Arab-Israeli
war of that same year. While UNTSO continues to perform this little-noted
mission, the nature of UN peacekeeping has undergone dramatic growth and
change in the ensuing decades.

The most dramatic of these changes occurred in the late 1980s, which
saw the demise of communism's vain pretense of historical inevitability,
the disintegration of the Iron Curtain, and the turn of the international
order away from a bipolar world. The numbers themselves tell the evolving
story of UN peacekeeping. In the 40 years from 1948 to 1988 the United
Nations mounted 13 peacekeeping operations. But since winning the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1988 for its sacrifices, the United Nations has undertaken
36 peacekeeping missions. At the peak in 1993, there were more than 80,000
civilian and military peacekeepers from 77 nations deployed around the
world, on every continent. As of 31 March 1999, that number had shrunk
to slightly more than 12,000 in 14 ongoing UN peacekeeping missions.[1]

To deal with the rising demand for its peacekeeping services, in 1992
the UN created a Department of Peacekeeping Operations--also called DPKO.
That department underwent predictable growing pains as member states sought
to have the world's premier international organization assume increasing
responsibility for resolving conflict in the new world order. This article
will outline those initiatives in UN peacekeeping management and describe
the recent proposals to restructure DPKO. These recent initiatives, born
out of member state frustration, mission/resource mismatch, and a diminished
appetite for global agendas, will certainly have a significant effect,
in ways yet to be determined, on the next ten years of UN peacekeeping.

The United Nations: A Primer

Created in the aftermath of World War II, the United Nations was established
by the UN Charter, an international treaty ratified by 185 sovereign member
states. Although the United Nations has six principal organs, only three
deal directly with peacekeeping matters: the General Assembly, the Security
Council, and the Secretariat. In the simplest terms, so far as peacekeeping
operations are concerned, the Security Council authorizes, the General
Assembly budgets, and the Secretariat manages.

The Security Council is the organ with primary responsibility under
the UN Charter for maintaining peace and security. Specifically, the Council,
with its five permanent and 10 rotating members, can under either Chapter
VI or Chapter VII of the Charter direct the undertaking of a peacekeeping
mission. The drafters of the United Nations Charter originally envisioned
that the Security Council, through its Military Staff Committee, would
manage these missions. However, due to the political dynamics of the Cold
War, the Military Staff Committee never became an operational body for
the supervision of UN military operations. Filling this void, the Secretariat
was forced to improvise, creating an executive arm to plan and manage Security
Council-directed peacekeeping operations. During the first 40 years, ad
hoc and informal arrangements were sufficient to manage the basic peacekeeping
operations, which were generally limited in scope.[2]

The General Assembly is sometimes called the closest thing to a world
parliament. However, it does not legislate in the same sense as national
parliaments do and has no power to compel action by any government. Nonetheless,
its resolutions are perceived to carry the weight of world opinion. The
General Assembly's role in peacekeeping is to frame and approve each operation
budget, once the Security Council has authorized an operation by adopting
an implementing resolution. The General Assembly also has approval authority
over the Secretariat's staffing tables, not only for the authorized mission,
but for the organization as a whole, particularly for DPKO. Unlike the
checks and balances system of the US government, there is no provision
for General Assembly vetoes or overrides of Security Council resolutions.

However, much like the US congressional structure, the UN General Assembly
has formed committees with specific functional responsibilities, primarily
for management oversight of the Secretariat and other UN activities. The
two most important committees for the budgeting of peacekeeping operations
are the Fifth Committee, composed of career diplomats representing the
member states, and the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary
Questions (ACABQ), composed of 16 recognized experts from around the world
who are charged with reporting to the Fifth Committee on the budgets and
accounts of the UN, and on the administrative budgets of the specialized
agencies.[3] The Fifth Committee in turn reports to the General Assembly
on all UN administrative and budgetary issues. The Secretariat of the UN
consists of international civil servants who work directly for the Secretary
General, either at the headquarters in New York or elsewhere in field operations
throughout the world. DPKO is among the larger elements of the Secretariat.

Finally, in terms of money, there are two budgets at the UN--the regular
budget and the peacekeeping support account. The regular budget, approximately
$1.3 billion annually, comes from assessments made on all member states
based upon their relative wealth. This pays for the staff and basic infrastructure
of the Secretariat, as well as many international programs. The United
States failed to pay part of its 1995 assessment and has been in arrears
ever since. After peacekeeping operations are authorized by the Security
Council, they are funded through a separate assessment of the member states.
The scale of assessment for peacekeeping support is different from the
scale determining assessments for the regular budget. Noteworthy is the
additional surcharge paid by the Security Council's five permanent members
(China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and
higher assessments made on the more industrialized nations.[4] It is from
these sources that the peacekeeping support account is drawn. The purpose
of this account is to cover the administrative and operational costs of
the peacekeeping missions. Most important, this account pays for the nonpermanent
staffing of DPKO. The significance of this source of annual funding is
that it is scrutinized by the ACABQ and referred for approval to the Fifth
Committee and then to the General Assembly. Consequently, any changes to
the structure and manning of DPKO are subject to the political winds of
the General Assembly.

UN Peacekeeping Adapts to the New World Order

Whereas during the first 40 years of peacekeeping the majority of missions
were primarily concerned with the mercifully few intractable interstate
conflicts (e.g. the Middle East and the Kashmir), peacekeeping operations
since 1988 have proliferated, primarily in response to the fallout from
the numerous failed states and a resurgence of ethnic claims of self-determination,
primarily in less-developed parts of the world. As part of his "Agenda
for Peace," and in order to better manage this increased demand for
peacekeeping operations, Secretary General Boutros-Boutros Ghali and the
Secretariat created DPKO in 1992, replacing the Office of Special Political
Affairs which had responsibility for peacekeeping operations up to that
time. While creating an organization to mange the many new missions would
be easy, staffing it with qualified personnel would be another matter.
Immediately it was recognized that the expertise to manage complex, integrated
peace operations did not then exist within the UN headquarters. As a means
to remedy the situation, UN General Assembly Resolution 47/71 (12 February
1993) encouraged the Secretary General to "invite member states to
provide qualified military and civilian personnel to assist in the planning
and management of peacekeeping operations."[5] The UN's need for qualified
military officers to manage the increasingly complex peacekeeping operations
became more urgent as missions in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, and Rwanda
gained international attention in the early 1990s.

After the General Assembly adopted Resolution 47/71 in 1993, an increasing
number of military staff officers from the armies of the member states
were assigned on loan, or "gratis," to DPKO. Within a couple
of years, nearly a quarter of the department's 400-plus staff were in fact
members of their nation's armed forces who worked for the Secretary General.
Being gratis meant that although they worked day to day for the UN and
not their home country, they were not formal employees of the UN.

The creation of DPKO was significant because it was both a policy and
operational department, and its initial bureaucratic culture was shaped
as much by the gratis military officers as it was by its international
civil servants. Within the first two years the military's influence in
energizing an effective headquarters was most apparent. The department
consolidated strategic and operational logistics, mission planning, military
advice, civilian police training and planning, peacekeeping training, and
current operations under one roof. Many of the original policies and procedures
took on a somewhat military, if not NATO, flavor.

As a result, development and support for peacekeeping operations by
UN headquarters became progressively more responsive, despite the increase
in missions and the more complex humanitarian emergencies of failed states.
While some will argue that such UN activity continued to display impotence
in peacekeeping (e.g., Bosnia, Angola), it is nonetheless a fact that the
organization has been transformed from the post-Somalia/Rwanda days. A
more balanced assessment of recent UN action would also include the successful
peacekeeping operations in Guatemala, Liberia, and Cambodia. One major
reason for the transformation was the cogent military advice present at
every step in the political process so that political decisionmakers in
the Secretariat and on the Security Council understood the military implications
of various policy options. The role of gratis military officers in making
this happen was substantial and recognized as such by leaders within both
the United States and the UN.[6]

General Assembly Reaction and DPKO's Response

Although countries on every continent and from nearly every culture
were represented in the gratis military officer pool, in reality most gratis
military officers came from the more industrialized nations. Of the 111
gratis officers assigned to DPKO in June 1997, 69 were from NATO countries,
with an additional 19 from close US allies and friends Argentina, Australia,
and Brazil. Thus representatives from such countries as Ghana, Namibia,
Bangladesh, and South Africa were clearly in the minority. One major reason
for this was simply cost. It is not cheap to work and live in the metropolitan
New York City area for anyone, let alone military officers funded by less-developed
nations.

Seeing this, countries from the Non-Aligned Movement, led by Pakistan,
adopted an agenda in 1997 calling for the elimination of gratis military
officers in DPKO. They felt particularly underrepresented within the department,
a situation that Ambassador Ahmed Kamal of Pakistan called an "unjustified
infiltration."[7] This sentiment found its expression in General Assembly
Resolution 51/243 on 15 September 1997: "Gratis personnel are not
a substitute for staff to be recruited against authorized posts for the
implementation of mandated programs and activities."[8] The Non-Aligneds'
argument against gratis officers was thus twofold: that they were geographically
imbalanced toward those countries who could afford gratis officers, giving
developed nations an unfair representation, even at a time when increasing
numbers of UN peacekeeping soldiers were coming from the third world; and
that if DPKO did have a legitimate requirement for positions to support
mandated activities, those positions should be filled through the UN's
politically sensitive hiring system.

Complementing this external attack was a general resentment many civilian
members within UN headquarters felt toward the gratis officers. Specifically,
members of the international civil service felt they did not control DPKO
as they clearly did the other Secretariat departments. The presence of
gratis officers, in their eyes, undermined the traditional method of bureaucratic
control in the headquarters, namely patronage. Unlike their civilian counterparts,
gratis military officers were not subject to the pressures of patronage
and could speak their minds without fear of retaliation or threat to their
career. Once their tour was over, these officers knew they would be returning
to their national military establishments. In short, there was a mismatch
of incentive structures between gratis officers and the international civil
servants who had worked years within the UN system, and this hindered close
cooperation between the two.

The Non-Aligneds' concern over DPKO's structure had some merit, since
the department did not have an approved staffing structure to guide its
growth from 1993 to 1997. More often than not over that period, if a need
arose, say, for transport specialists to oversee military contracts, it
was met through an appeal for a gratis military officer with the necessary
skills. This haphazard growth by ad hoc requests from the UN to member
states, while cost-effective in the short run because the officers came
free of charge to the UN, also afforded the department the luxury of never
having to conduct a much needed bottom-up review of its organizational
structure. To spur the Secretary General's efforts to reorient DPKO further,
the September 1997 General Assembly resolution alluded to above mandated
conditions whereby he could accept future gratis personnel only "to
provide expertise not available within the organization for very specialized
functions" and "to provide temporary and urgent assistance in
the case of new or expanded mandates of the organization." The resolution
also called for the expeditious phasing-out of all gratis personnel who
did not fall within the scope of the new conditions set forth, stipulating
that the Secretary General should report quarterly to the General Assembly
on his efforts.[9]

Following passage of this particular General Assembly resolution, the
Secretariat realized it had to develop a plan to change from an organization
dependent on gratis military officers to one that would rely on civilian
and military officers paid from the peacekeeping support account.[10] At
first, the Secretary General said in a report to the Fifth Committee dated
8 December 1997 that, because the loss of gratis officers would "seriously
jeopardize the ability of the department to carry out its functions fully,"
he intended to phase their positions out over a period of time, to be completed
by 31 December 1999.[11] However, that date was immediately abandoned once
the department realized it needed to convince the ACABQ and Fifth Committee
to finance replacement posts for the departing gratis officers in order
to maintain its size and structure. DPKO's strategy was simple, if unsophisticated.
To secure support of the Non-Aligneds, the department would accept early
departure of gratis officers in an implicit exchange of support for an
expanded, and fully funded, civilian structure. This proposal was formally
announced when the Under Secretary General for Peacekeeping, Bernard Miyet,
briefed the Special Committee on Peacekeeping on 2 April 1998. The General
Assembly directs the committee, which consists of nearly 100 member states,
to conduct an annual review of peacekeeping in all its aspects and to submit
an assessment report that includes recommendations on how to improve UN
peacekeeping performance. At this meeting, Miyet said a plan would be submitted
to the ACABQ to end the use of gratis personnel by the end of 1998, one
year earlier than previously requested by the Secretary General. His resolve
on the gratis officer issue was made clear in a press release concerning
the meeting, in which he was quoted as saying, "We will try to get
rid of them all by the end of the year."[12]

Member states, including those heavily involved in peacekeeping and
who had gratis officers within DPKO, were taken by surprise. The department
had avoided dialogue with those states contributing gratis officers and
had intentionally not provided advance notice of its plan. The Non-Aligneds,
desiring immediate departure of the gratis officers, seized upon the proposal
for the departure of gratis officers no later than December 1998 and demanded
that this be accomplished. The result was that rather than having 18 months
to manage the transition of one quarter of its structure from gratis military
to contract international civil servants, DPKO would have to transform
itself in one-third that time.

Unfortunately, once the offer to eliminate gratis officers was accepted
by the Non-Aligneds and Fifth Committee, the department did not have a
realistic transition plan and lacked a comprehensive vision of what shape
the department would take once they were gone. Hoping to retain as much
of its existing structure as possible, DPKO in its budget proposal for
the UN fiscal year starting 1 July 1998 called for converting 106 of the
134 gratis positions to paid positions.[13] During a series of difficult
and contentious negotiations, first the ACABQ and then the Fifth Committee
remained unconvinced that DPKO needed the number of people it claimed in
the face of a decline in the number of soldiers on peacekeeping missions
from its high point in 1993. After all committee testimony was completed
in June 1998, the Fifth Committee finally resolved to hold the department
to a compromise deadline of 28 February 1999 for the departure of all gratis
military officers and to review the matter about staffing numbers in October
1998 during the 53d General Assembly. The Secretariat met the deadline,
but at the price of a poorly coordinated transition which resulted in little
or no overlap between the departing gratis officers and their newly hired
replacements.

Implications for the United States

Over the past half century, there has been an evolution in the international
consensus on how to staff, structure, and manage peacekeeping operations
at the United Nations. For the first 40 years the rigid nature of the Cold
War limited the number of missions and ensured that they were relatively
simple operations, with UN forces interposed between two hostiles. Consequently,
they were managed, more or less successfully, in an ad hoc fashion by the
UN's Secretariat. When the dramatic need for large and increasingly complex
operations became apparent early in the 1990s, the international community
called upon the UN to assume a larger role and volunteered military officers
to help staff DPKO. Our own government, as outlined in Presidential Decision
Directive 25, The Clinton Administration's Policy on Reforming Multilateral
Peace Operations, moved aggressively to assist the Secretary General's
peacekeeping initiatives. At one point, over a dozen US officers from all
services were assigned gratis to DPKO. These officers did not arrive in
time to shape UN operations in Somalia or Bosnia, but their presence did
bring the UN greater capacity in the areas of mission planning, logistics,
peacekeeping training, doctrine development, and management of day-to-day
operations.

While their assignment to the UN did indirectly benefit overall US foreign
policy, there has been a more direct benefit through the establishment
of a training relationship between the UN and several unified commands.
The need for peacekeepers, UN or otherwise, remains undiminished, and many
militaries around the world are pushing hard to participate in peacekeeping
operations and to have their officers and soldiers trained for such use.
In response, several Commanders-in-Chief of US regional unified combatant
commands have hosted or helped organize peacekeeping exercises with nations
in their areas of responsibility, all in consonance with the engagement
element of US national strategy.

However, as we have seen, the international consensus has changed. A
clear message has been sent that the UN's General Assembly does not want
gratis military officers, particularly those from the developed nations,
managing peacekeeping operations. At the same time there also appears to
be Security Council reluctance to mount large-scale operations involving
thousands of UN blue-helmeted peacekeepers. Unfortunately, while technically
successful, the staffing of DPKO with gratis officers created a culturally
different department from any other in the Secretariat. Consequently, conflict
was unavoidable both within the Secretariat and between constituent blocs
of member states over how peacekeeping operations should be controlled,
on the one hand, and how the Secretariat should be staffed, on the other.

Indeed, one can argue that the UN has in some ways become marginalized
in light of a trend toward the consignment of peacekeeping operations to
regional organizations like NATO in Bosnia, the Commonwealth of Independent
States in Georgia, and ECOMOG[14] in West Africa. The UN's role in these
missions seems to be to provide a cloak of legitimacy and limited political
oversight through deployment of a small numbers of observers. In the Balkans,
however, the Yugoslavian government successfully insisted that any use
of peacekeeping or protection forces in Kosovo occur under the sanction
and auspices of the UN, regardless that it was NATO, acting independently,
that conducted the coercive aerial campaign against Yugoslavia.[15] That
fact notwithstanding, the heightened challenge of failed-state peacekeeping
has cooled the initial international enthusiasm for peacekeeping operations.

The implications for the United States, and its Army, of a weakened
peacekeeping capacity at the UN are significant. Properly employed and
supported, UN peacekeeping operations are a force multiplier for the United
States in the sense that an effective UN peacekeeping operation means one
less potential demand on our already limited military resources. Having
gratis officers at the UN gave the United States the opportunity to influence
events, improve UN performance and chances for success, and decrease the
likelihood of direct US military involvement. Without a robust United Nations
peacekeeping capacity, the US military will likely find itself more frequently
involved in conflicts around the world, either out of humanitarian concerns
or on grounds of vital national interests. Sending troops on repetitive
peacekeeping assignments increases our forces' operating tempo and runs
the danger of dulling the warfighting skills of tactical units. Recent
experiences in Bosnia and Haiti illustrate this problem, and highlight
the open-ended nature of these missions. The US government has already
acknowledged that its troop commitment in Kosovo is "open-ended."

In order to have a greater opportunity to shape policies and organizational
performance at the UN, the United States should consider recommitting itself
to the organization--and paying dues that are in arrears would be a constructive
first step. Agreed, the United Nations is not perfect. It can be maddeningly
frustrating at times and certainly bureaucratic. Still, as a result of
the gratis officer and other initiatives, it is far better and more efficient
in the military arena than it was even five years ago, almost to the point
of being a totally different organization. It would be counterproductive
if, through shortsightedness, we allowed the potential of this force multiplier
to waste away. With Presidential Decision Directive 25 and the assignment
of talented officers to the UN five years ago, the United States said it
was committed. An update of PDD 25 now would reaffirm this commitment,
enhancing prospects for UN peacekeeping to remain an effective complement
to our nation's security strategy.

As for the future of UN peacekeeping, at the very least it appears that
the ability of the UN to effectively plan and execute peacekeeping operations
will be significantly degraded for many months, if not a year or more.
This is unfortunate because a successful peacekeeping mission, particularly
now, would help restore the UN's credibility. It is in our national interest
to ensure that the UN retains its capacity to plan, manage, and support
peacekeeping operations. One hopes the current degradation in capacity
will be temporary and that the United Nations will again earn the international
support necessary to "save succeeding generations from the scourge
of war," the noble aspiration proclaimed in the opening line of its
Charter.

2. Article 47 of the UN Charter establishes the Military Staff Committee,
consisting of the Chiefs of Staff of the Permanent Members of the Security
Council or their representatives. It is "responsible under the Security
Council for the strategic direction of any armed forces placed at the disposal
of the Security Council." Today the Military Staff Committee rarely
meets and has ceded total control of peacekeeping operations to DPKO and
the UN Secretariat.

4. Ten countries pay 88 percent of the peacekeeping assessment: Canada,
France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, United Kingdom,
and the United States. The United States is assessed at 30.5 percent but,
at the direction of Congress, pays only 25 percent. In 1997-98 the cost
of UN peacekeeping operations was approximately $1 billion, for which the
United States was assessed $268 million. The account also pays for 279
of the 343 positions currently authorized in DPKO. See also, http://www.un.org/Depts/DPKO/pk50_w.htm.

5. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 47/71, 12 February 1993,
Comprehensive Review of the Whole Question of Peacekeeping Operations
in All Their Aspects, para. 37.

6. Secretary General Kofi Annan recognized the valuable contribution
of gratis military officers in comments made at a DPKO town hall meeting
at UN headquarters, 29 October 1998, attended by one of the authors.

8. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 51/243, 15 September 1997,
Gratis Personnel Provided by Governments and Other Entities, para.
1.

9. Ibid., para. 4. (a) and (b).

10. The Peacekeeping Support Account was established in 1993 to fund
peacekeeping operations separately from the regular budget and to fund
the headquarters functions that became necessary with the management of
numerous missions. With the departure of gratis military officers, all
personnel in DPKO will have to be paid either from the regular budget,
which is currently capped, or from the peacekeeping support account. Therefore,
the departure of 134 gratis military officers has significant budgetary
implications.

11. Report of the Secretary General, "Phasing Out the Use of Gratis
Personnel in the Secretariat," 8 December 1997, para. 14.

12. United Nations Press Release GA/PK/155 dated 2 April 1998, "Under-Secretary-General
Announces Proposal to End Use of Gratis Personnel in Peacekeeping Department
by End of Year." See also http://www.un.org/plweb-cgi/idoc.

13. Report of the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary
Questions, "Gratis Personnel Provided by Governments and Other Entities,"
7 May 1998, para. 17.

Colonel Robert L. McClure commands the 1st Infantry Division's engineer
brigade, in Bamberg, Germany. He previously was assigned to the Mission
Planning Service, Department of Peacekeeping Operations, at the United
Nations headquarters in New York. Before his UN assignment he was an Army
War College Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies,
and commanded the 92d Engineer Battalion, Ft. Stewart, Georgia. He is a
graduate of the US Military Academy and the US Army Command and General
Staff College, and holds master's degrees in public administration from
Harvard and in systems management from the University of Southern California.

Lieutenant Colonel Morton Orlov II is an infantry officer assigned to
the US Mission to the United Nations in New York City. Recently selected
for battalion command, he was the Chief of Plans for the 25th Infantry
Division and the Deputy Chief of Plans for Multinational Force Haiti during
Operation Uphold Democracy in 1995. He is a graduate of Tufts University,
the US Army Command and General Staff College, and the School of Advanced
Military Studies.